Defending the Marxist citadel

In the last several years, English-speaking readers have been treated to a plethora of Soviet history books unlike others before them. The opening of Soviet archives has given us everything from Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book on Stalin’s court, to new biographies of Rasputin, Lenin and Trotsky. Now, however, we have The Soviet Century, the work of a respected American academic. It is a book whose qualities are not easy to describe.

Speaking frankly, my first reaction to Lewin’s book was one of puzzlement. Despite reading the introduction, which promised a ‘presentation of general aspects of the system’, it took me quite a long time to work out what the professor was getting at. The book is written out of chronological order — not in itself a fault, but in this case without any clear purpose. It makes use of new archival material, but not in a way that seems designed to shed profound new light on any particular issues.